Facebook to build data center 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle

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Running a data center of any size is an expensive business due to the hardware costs, the cooling required, and of course the large amounts of electricity needed to run one. When you’re the size of Facebook those costs escalate due to the size of the data centers you need to operate.

So when it comes time to open a new data center, choosing the location carefully can potentially save a lot of money. Facebook has clearly opted to minimize its cooling costs by selecting a location 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle for its next build, and its first outside of the US.

The new data center is being planned to help serve its millions of users in the European region better. It will be located in the city of Lulea in northern Sweden. Not only is it very cold there, being so close to the Arctic, but it is also in the vicinity of large hydropower stations pumping out twice the energy of the Hoover Dam.

Facebook need access to a large amount of power due to the size of this new data center that is set to come online in 2014. It will be 300,000 square feet and will use 120MW of energy. It is believed all of that will be provided by the local hydropower stations making it a very green data center.

Whether Facebook expand their operations beyond a data center in Lulea is unknown, but the city is a growing hotbed of technology with over 2,000 people already employed in the IT industry there.